Amplifiers are an important building block in integrated circuit (IC) devices such as communications transmitters and receivers. Amplifiers are typically designed to provide a desired gain to an input signal, while minimizing overall power consumption and/or the level of distortion in an output signal. Amplifier design often requires making certain trade-offs to achieve a desired level of performance, e.g., trading off low power consumption for good linearity, or trading off large dynamic range for fine resolution.
It would be desirable to have techniques to relax such design trade-offs to allow for greater design flexibility, as well as to improve overall amplifier performance.